Saturday, February 15, 2014

Yesterday Beauty, Today Classic, Tomorrow Treasure: Seiko Crown

Seiko Crown J15002E

Woooooo this is a very handsome looking gold toned classic dress watch. It is a Seiko Crown from the early 1960's. The Seiko Crown was first released by Suwa Seikosha factory in 1959. It came in 3 variants of movement: the 19, 21 and 23 Jewels. All of which were mechanical winding watches using the calibre 560.

From a distance, this Seiko Crown looks like the first Grand Seiko GS 3180 that was released around the same era. An era of well made manual wind watches from Seiko. Many interesting names were used by Seiko during this period such as Skyliner, Champion, Lord Marvel, Goldfeather, and Crown.

This Seiko Crown is measuring at 34mm without its crown and the case and caseback are 14K gold filled. At the caseback is an engraving of the wordings Seiko Crown, followed by the model number.

Most of these hand-winding Seiko watches used the dome shaped acrylic crystal. One thing worth mentioning about this particular watch is that its crown is very artistically beautiful.

This Seiko Crown has a very appealing silver sunburst dial decorated to perfection using gold baton as hour markers. The dial is clean and simple with only black calligraphic wordings of Seiko Crown and Diashock 21 Jewels. At the bottom of the dial is the word Japan.

Matching this watch with a brown colour leather strap really gives it an elegance and noble taste... this is a true beauty of 1960's, a classic collection item of 2000's and a treasure for the future..............

Below is a photo showing CaliberSeikosha 560 that was used in so many Seiko watches..... This is the exact movement of my Seiko Crown. This is a high grade movement and is worth to collect.....

Below are various Japanese reference books' or magazines' articles on Seiko Crown:

Ending this posting with a video that I found on Youtube showing the mechanic of Seikosha Calibre 560 at work.....

P.S. I have focused on gold toned watch for the last one week or so....... Need to change taste for time being.......